“Not at all. I have some things to do around the house. Take your time.”
He did and it wasn’t easy, a little battle between his detective’s urge to seek out and absorb all evidence and his personal desire never to have anything more to do with Emmylou Dideroff or any of her works. He had hoped that it would be a regular confession, a list of facts, of crimes committed, not something so intimate, not something directed at him, Paz, as if he were a literal confessor. He felt as if she were looking into him in that hideous way she had in the interview room,something looking at him through her. He made himself finish it and then leaned back and closed his eyes. He was going crazy, getting undeniable now, it was affecting his work already, and now this flesh- crawling nauseated feeling as he read the notebook, he was going mad, or else…
His mind skipped a little, like a scratched record. He was going mad, or else…or else it was…Paz’s well-oiled circuit breakers popped. When he opened his eyes again, Lorna was sitting across from him, in the warm mango- scented shade.
“So, what do you think?”
He blinked and sat up. She said, “You were sleeping. Was it that boring?”
“No, I was just thinking,” he said, rubbing his face.
“No one will ever admit that they’re asleep, except when they’re in bed. I wonder why that is?”
“You’re the psychologist, Lorna. You tell me.”
She let this pass, pointing to the notebook. “Any conclusions?”
With some effort, Paz reinhabited his cop persona. “No, but I’m dying to hear the rest of it. Any chance of us doing a full-scale interrogation at this point?”
“On a mental patient? Look, this has to come out as it comes. She gets extremely hostile when you press her on stuff that’s outside the stream of the narrative. She seized the last time I pushed her.”
“But she’s playing with us. I mean you picked that up, right? You got that whole cornpone peckerwood thing, and there’s what sounds like an educated woman looking over her shoulder and making wiseass remarks, and then there’s the religious nut quoting St. Augustine. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not anything like a real confession.”
“No, but you’re not looking at an integrated personality here. We all agree that she’s seriously deranged.”
Paz got up abruptly and paced a few times across the flagstones, then turned to face her, pointing. “Say I give you that. Say it’s sound and fury, she’s traumatized, whatever, multiple personalities?”
“I didn’t say multiple personalities….”
“Well, whatever?deranged, like you said. The key thing here, thekey thing, is what’snot in that book. Hm?”
“The dog that didn’t bark in the night.”
“That dog.” A quick grin. “Which is, there is absolutely nothing there that would make anyone take the risk of doing a B and E to get it. An armed burglary, which is very rare. Burglars are almost never armed. I mean why risk it?the whole point of burglary is in-and-out, nobody sees you.”
“There’s the sexual stuff.”
“You mean for blackmail? No, the perp is dead, and I can’t see old Ray Bob’s family wanting to protect his good name after all these years. Okay, there’s the Foy dope dealing too, but I can’t see that either. She could say she bought smack from the governor, it’s not probative, it don’t mean anything without concrete evidence. It could be the ravings of a lunatic, no, itis the ravings of a lunatic. So why is it maybe worth killing for?”
“You think it’s connected to…”
He rolled his eyes. “Well, hell, yeah! The vic, the Arab, comes to town, he sells some oil and talks about a huge oil find, it’s going to change the world oil situation, and he also says he’s hiring muscle, he’s scared of something. Then, of all the people he could possibly meet in Miami, who does he run into but our girl Emmylou, who has a reason to whack him, and who gets found in his place after he gets slammed on the head with an auto part out of her truck and tossed off his balcony? You think that’s a coincidence?”
“It could be,” she says weakly.
“No way. My boss said it, and it’s true. Somebody’s playing with us, and…hm.” Paz stopped and stared off into the middle distance for a long half minute. Then he pulled a cell phone out of the pocket of his jeans. “Excuse me a second,” he said and called up a number. He walked a small distance away and turned his back.
“Yo, Tito, it’s me. Yeah, I’m good. Look, man, I want you to do something for me. Get the package on Dodo Cortez, tour his usual places, talk to his known associates. No, this’s got nothing to do with the shooting; the shooting is cool, but I want to know what he’s been up to recently, his source of income, who he was working for. I especially want to know if there’s any connection whatever between him and Jack Wilson. No, don’t go see Wilson. No, we’ll go see him together. Just get all the background you can. Are you following me here? You know why I want this, right?”
“Right,” said Paz after a longer pause. “Good man. Get back to me at my place tomorrow, on the land line, not the cell. Okay, take care.”
Paz sat down across from Lorna, his face more serious than it had been. “Lorna. Look, here’s the thing. I don’t want to freak you out or anything, but it just now hit me: I don’t like that they sent Dodo Cortez on this.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s not a breakin artist at all. He’s a shooter. You would’ve been home that morning if I hadn’t called you and asked you to come to my place.”
A small gasp from Lorna. “What, you think he would’vethreatened me? But I don’tknow anything.”
“Yeah, butthey don’t know that. All they know is that she’s writing stuff down and you’re her therapist. People tell stuff to therapists. Maybe she told you the thing.”
“What thing?What? Oh, God, this is ridiculous! It’s like some movie…secret messages, guns, people getting shot. No, thank you, this isnot part of my job, this isnot happening to me.” She looked away from him. “I’m sorry. This is starting to look like a mistake on my part. I mean an interesting case and all, but, ah, I can’t have this kind of stuff, threats and bloodshed. No, I’m sorry, that’s not me.”
Nearly a minute slipped by in silence. Then Paz said, in a neutral voice, “Okay, you can pass the case on to somebody else. I mean, I think we can reduce the risk to…whoever, but if you can’t handle it, you can’t. I’ll keep this notebook and we’ll make arrangements to get any others she produces.”
He picked up the notebook. He said, “If you do decide to drop out, you’ll let me know who the new man is, okay? Nice seeing you again.”
He started to leave.
Lorna finds herself up on her feet, the metal chair scraping the flags with an unpleasant violent noise, and she hears her own voice saying, “No, please, stay. I didn’t mean it that way.”
She knows she did mean it that way. The new man. The new man. Did he do that on purpose, is he that manipulative? Doesn’t matter; she’s manipulated. He cocks his head a little and gives her a searching look, connecting, not staring at her tits this time; she’d thought Oh, no, not another one of those, and now she sees he’s not, although she doesn’t know quite what to think of his eyes on her body, and here they’re in the middle of a desperate professional conversation. The strong light through the mango tree renders a camouflage pattern on his tan face and lends glitter to his odd light eyes. She is frightened of him, there’s a voice in her head sayingStupid stupid crazy you’re crazy get away from this stupid crazy…. It’s a voice she knows well, her father’s voice, and these were and are his favorite expressions for anything outside the pale of his rationality.Don’t be stupid, Lorna! That’s crazy, Amy! The dead mom.Don’t be crazy, Amy, there’s nothing wrong with you. Was that something he actually said? Or something she imagined him saying. No,focus, Lorna…
The cop is still looking at her, but now there is a tiny wrinkle on his smooth forehead. “Are you okay?” he says.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
He grins impudently. “No one will ever admit they have a problem, except when they’re bleeding. Why is that?”
She can’t catch her breath and there is no strength in her legs. She goes down hard into her chair, and again that scraping sound.
After clearing her throat, swallowing some tea, she finds her voice. “I’m sorry, really. I guess it all just hit me at once. There was a…a killer in my house and you shot him dead right on my sidewalk.” She cries, not hysterics thank God, just a slow ooze of tears. She dabs delicately with a paper napkin, careful of her eye makeup.
